Sore Losers

Sore losers are never attractive, never sensible and never properly place the blame. Jennifer Rubin reminds us that this hold true in politics as well. Excerpt:

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate — what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally? We had a somewhat artificial debate between traditionalists and reformers. If anything, the anger was directly (unfairly, in my mind) against George W. Bush (whose tax cuts even many Democrats now want to extend, and whose strategy in Iraq allowed Obama to withdrawal troops in victory), and to the hapless McCain campaign (which spent the final days of the campaign ragging on its VP nominee).

This is yet another confirmation that the right and left look at America – and Americans – quite differently. The leftists view their countrymen as in dire need of supervision — by elites like them, of course. Americans are not competent to make decisions on their own, and left to their own devices, will run amok. Wall Streeters are greedy, New Yorkers are xenophobes, and the rest of us are Bible- and gun-huggers. And here we go again — acting out and acting up. Obama, the poor dear, just can’t talk sense to us.

This is entirely true in my experience. Post 2008 election discussions and arguments in which I participated were themed around candidates and strategies. Questions posed: Did Sarah Palin hurt the ticket? Would Romney have fared better? Should McCain have gone after the Rev. Wright stuff? My crazier friends suggested that McCain could have won if he'd brought up the birth certificate issue, but even they didn't blame the voters.

It would be wonderful if this were the year we finally buried the "blame the angry voters" meme altogether, however, I'm too realistic to hold my breath until I hear shoveling. But think about this: when liberals blame voter "fear and anger" like President Obama did in his Parma speech ("...the easiest thing for the other side to do is to ride this fear and anger all the way to Election Day....") they are really accusing independent and swing voters of possessing the anger, not right-wingers. We could wake up to find that we inherited a half million dollars, that our son just won a full scholarship to our favorite college and that we landed a long sought after promotion―and we'd still go vote Republican and conservative even if there were not a cloud in the sky and the home team was winning 10-0. We are not swayed one bit by emotion or lack thereof. It's the swing voters to whom these remarks refer; indeed, they are the intended targets of an attempted shaming. The left will chose this tactic over admitting that their policies are unpopular or that they are out-of-touch with the middle or that their message is outmoded, weak and ineffective.

I don't think it's going to work this year. That hope and change doesn't float anymore.